How to See defects in Kanban board under Epic swim lane

[Sahoo Manas (SEIT)]

Hello,

I have a jira board which is Kanban and swim lanes by epic is set. It works well and I can see all the stories based on epics. However, I also get a few defects from a central team and they use the epics from their project. So those defects appear in backlog, but not in active sprint. Is this a problem you have faced and know any work around ?

If it is a bug in standard product, can we report it somehow ?

Kind Regards

Manas

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Sahoo Manas (SEIT) 

When you set up your board to display swimlanes by Epics the board will display only the issues that are in Epics that are within the scope of your board filter and issues that are not associated to any epic.

Issues that are associated to an Epic where the epic is not in scope for your board filter cannot be displayed because

1. your board doesn't include that epic
2. The choices for board display are a swimlane for an epic that is in your board or a swimlane for issues that have no epic at all.

The issue will still show in the backlog because the backlog is showing all issues in the scope of your board filter. You will notice that the epic from the other project is probably not in the Epic list in your backlog. If you start filtering your backlog by clicking on the Epics and then finally clicking on the Issues Without Epics option you will find that the issue linked to the epic in the other project will not display in any of those filtered lists.

By setting your board to use Epic swimlanes you will exclude any issue that is otherwise in scope of your board filter, but linked to an epic that is not itself in scope for your board filter.

You would need to modify your board filter to include the epics from the other project to enable those issues linked to those epics to display in your board when Swimlanes is set to Epics.

[Sahoo Manas (SEIT)]

Yes that explains the behaviour. Getting a defect to our team board from a central team is quite common in our company and it could be a common use case in many other companies too. Considering the defect shows up in board when epic lane is not selected and disappears when epic lane is selected, it sounds like a gap in design. 

The JIRA could be fixed to either

• show the defect in this case under the no epic area or
• bring the epic to the board(if the ticket is assigned to the board)

Then it will not be a suprirse to the user that why it does not appear. Does Atlassian has any channel to recieve such feeedback to add to their backlog ?

Kind Regards

Manas

[Trudy Claspill]

If you go to https://support.atlassian.com, you should find a button at the bottom of the screen for contacting their support organization. Through a support ticket you could request that they open an issue in their backlog.

I suspect that there would a long wait for such a change to be implemented, as both your suggestions are contradictory to the design of the product.

1. Showing the issue when the Issues Not In Epics filter was selected would imply that the issue is not assigned to an Epic and was available to assign to some Epic. That would not actually be the case.

2. Bringing the Epic to the board would be contradictory to the design that only the issues within scope of the board filter are shown on the board.

[Sahoo Manas (SEIT)]

Thank you. I agree that the suggestion 1 is bit contradictory, though it is a quicker fix. 

But also suggestion 2 is not very consistent like you said. 

I may have not fully comprehended your original answer about modifying the filter to include the epics from other projects. Assuming there are many projects in the company and a defect may come to our board, then we have a defect in our project and epic in the original project.  Is it possible to write a filter which dynamically include all parent epics irrespective of project name? 

KInd Regads

Manas

[Trudy Claspill]

There are multiple ways your board filter might be modified to include epics from other projects.

1. Add an explicit epic list
   OR "Epic Link" in (xxx-1, yyy-2, zzz-3)
2. Pull in absolutely all the epics from every project
   OR (issueType=Epic and project !=<your project>)
3. Get an add-on that will let you create a sophisticated filter that will let you pull in just the Epics from other projects that have been associated with the issues that are in your filter.

Keep in mind that the people with whom you share that board filter are going to need Browse Project permissions in all the other project where your issues are linked to Epics. If any of those projects have restricted Browse Project permissions, then people may not be able to view your board.